I. Field
The present disclosure relates generally to communication, and more specifically to power control techniques for use in a wireless communication system.
II. Background
Wireless communication systems are widely deployed to provide various communication content such as voice, video, packet data, messaging, broadcast, etc. These wireless systems may be multiple-access systems capable of supporting multiple users by sharing the available system resources. Examples of such multiple-access systems include Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) systems, Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) systems, Frequency Division Multiple Access (FDMA) systems, Orthogonal FDMA (OFDMA) systems, and Single-Carrier FDMA (SC-FDMA) systems.
A wireless communication system may include a number of base stations that can support communication for a number of user equipments (UEs). A base station may include multiple transmit and/or receive antennas. Each UE may include multiple transmit and/or receive antennas. In certain designs, such as the Release-8 and Release-9 versions of the Long Term Evolution (LTE) standard (“Rel-8” and “Rel-9” herein), a base station may control the transmit power level of a UE by transmitting a transmit power control message to the UE from time to time. However, the need for more upstream bandwidth is ever increasing, requiring flexible and dynamic transmit power control in the uplink. Furthermore, LTE-Advanced supports multiple transmit antenna configurations in the uplink direction, requiring transmit power control of multiple antenna configurations.
There is a need to extend the existing transmit power control mechanism.